The 1992 Television Movie A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story Gives Virginia Madsen an Insanely Juicy Role as a Larger Than Life Real World Femme Fatale
That’s one murderous affair!
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In the early 1990s the American public was riveted by the seedy saga of Carolyn Warmus, a sexually voracious schoolteacher who murdered her married husband’s wife in a headline-grabbing crime with irresistible echoes of Fatal Attraction.
Warmus’ crimes inspired a pair of 1992 television movies. In September ABC released A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story starring Virginia Madsen as the notorious real-life femme fatale. A month later The Danger of Love: The Carolyn Warmus Story followed starring Madsen’s Hearts of Dixie costar Jenny Robertson as the sexy murderess.
True crime television and true crime podcasts are predictably obsessed with Warmus, who was released on parole in 2019 after decades in the big house for her sexy, sexy crimes.
As we have documented extensively and exhaustively in this column, Madsen played a LOT of roles like this at this stage in her career. One of the most talented and charismatic, not to mention breathtakingly gorgeous young actresses of the 1980s somehow found herself typecast as a rich man’s Shannon Tweed in a series of exploitative erotic thrillers for television, home video and very occasionally, the big screen.
These films and roles only look interchangeable. In actuality, there’s a sizable gulf in quality between the regrettable misfires Love Kills, Linda and Third Degree Burn and guilty pleasures like The Hot Spot, Gotham, Victim of Love, Bitter Vengeance and this.
A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story reunites Madsen with Martin Davidson, the director of her stellar 1987 television movie Long Gone and its lesser follow-up, 1989’s Heart of Dixie. More importantly, she also reunites with Long Gone and Hearts of Dixie cinematographer Robert Elswit, who would go on to work extensively with Paul Thomas Anderson, winning an Academy Award for his work on There Will Be Blood.
The movie unsurprisingly looks fantastic. It’s a luminous soft-focus erotic fantasy that manages to radiate incandescent sexuality despite the hideousness of the era’s clothes. With the possible exception of The Hot Spot, Madsen has never been sexier or more wantonly wicked.
The role of Carolyn Warmus is a corker. It affords an exceedingly game and wildly qualified Madsen an opportunity to do a real-world version of the sexy destroyers Glenn Close played in Fatal Attraction and Sharon Stone rode to superstardom in Basic Instinct, the larger than life embodiment of the danger and excitement of forbidden lust.
In the face of the tsunami force of his mistress’ needs and desires, poor Paul Solomon (Chris Sarandon), Carolyn Warmus’ lover, doesn’t stand a chance.
A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story opens with Paul’s long-suffering wife Betty Jean (Lenore Kasdorf) getting the shock of her soon to end life when someone breaks into their home and shoots her repeatedly while she calls 911.
We don’t see who the shooter is. We don’t have to. The title is a bit of a giveaway, as is the fact that audiences for the TV movie in 1992 would probably be familiar with how the story played out in real life.
But we also never doubt for a moment that the person who pulled the trigger was the notorious name in the title because of the outsized villainy of Madsen’s performance. Madsen plays Caroline Warmus as an endlessly ingratiating sociopath all too aware of the dizzying, disorienting effect that she has on straight men.
She’s a shameless vixen who ingratiates herself into the life of her coworker turned married lover, winning over her lover’s children and flashing her boyfriend’s wife a dazzling smile while planning her cold blooded assassination.
In the grand tradition of Film Noir victims, Paul is a profoundly weak man powerless before his lover’s overpowering lust and sinister machinations. He’s a sexy schmuck who falls apart following his wife’s death.
Paul has a constitution of wobbly Jell-O but Carolyn has nerves of steel and ice-water in her veins. There’s a wonderful scene where Carolyn goes to the police station to answer questions about the murder that we know damn well she committed. She nevertheless swaggers defiantly into the lion’s den, an impossibly big smile on her face and a spring in her step.
She should be terrified. Instead she seems overjoyed to be in the presence of manly men in uniforms, all of whom she shoots an unmistakably flirtatious smile. It’s a sexy grin that sends the false promise that if the recipient of her suggestive smile plays his cards right, he might end up in bed with her in a matter of hours.
Carolyn’s flirtatiousness extends to her behavior during her initial interview. The straight-laced detective is all business but she keeps trying to push things into a personal direction. She may be a teacher by trade, like Paul, but her real job, gift and art form are all seduction. She is a seductress by nature and inclination, a woman who is not shy about using her body and her sexuality to achieve her sinister ends.
Carolyn knows no limits or boundaries. When Paul flies down to the islands with a new love after Carolyn kills his wife she flies down so that she can stalk him. The sinful seductress is eventually caught and arrested but will she be able to charm her way out of jail?
The great Robert Picardo and a young William H. Macy play opposing attorneys in the trial that ends the film. Their presence adds to the overachieving air of a sordid docudrama that’s way more entertaining and juicy than it has any right to be thanks to a mesmerizing turn by Madsen, a solid supporting cast and dazzling work by a cinematographer destined for bigger and better things.
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